Technology has speeded up the communication process both within an organisation and outside it.
With Intranet portal, organisations can now share documents, information, events and news across all departments within their organisation. If created with the right strategies in mind, the Intranet portal can enhance the productivity as well as the service quality in the organisation. It also promotes internal business collaboration across the organisation. If you intend to boost business collaboration with external stakeholders like, customers, suppliers, volunteers, partners, etc., you should opt for Extranet. With Extranet, you can provide controlled access of your internal network to external users over Office 365 (SharePoint online) and facilitate smooth collaboration among external partners and internal staffs.
Let’s take a look at the meaning of external users:
An external user is not a part of your organisation, but can access SharePoint Online sites. He or she is not licensed to use SharePoint Online. They can inherit your SharePoint user rights and view or use the solution, if you invite them.
Features of SharePoint Server Extranet:
- In Extranet, some portion of an organisation’s process or information is shared with partners or customers through a securely extended private network.
- Extranet can offer customers segmentation control to reduce cross pollenisation of data, give access to targeted content as well as search result limitation depending on audience profiles.
- With Extranet environment, you can offer flawless support to overseas users through an authentic procedure. You can implement security concepts like, internal data segregation and partner isolation to assist external partners in participating in the business procedure.
- With the help of Office 365 (SharePoint online), you can flexibly configure extranet access to site data and sites. A configuration approach includes Internet-facing access to site data. Extranet content is hosted within the corporate network of the organization and made to be available through an isolated environment or an edge network.
- External users can submit forms or request services on the service request system.
- You can implement Extranet with shared or separate AD infrastructure
Building Extranet Portal:
Each group of external users can have individual sites like, Committee Portal, Board of Directors Portal, Volunteer Portal, Reseller Portal and more. The sites are set up in a manner so as to enable only the members of those particular sites to access the data in them.
As per the function of the group, the site can be operational like, form processing, job schedules, business processes and the like. It may also be a simple site with a calendar and primary document sharing as features.
With some training into SharePoint, you can easily build a portal on your own. But, you need to build it by keeping in mind that the extranet portal is presented to external users and should therefore be far more efficient than Intranet. You can use pre-built solutions to deploy extranet in a cost-effective manner.
Prometix has extensive experience in architecting and implementing extranet based solutions in Office 365 and SharePoint on premise. There are three possible options in implementing the extranet and they are Office 365, SharePoint on promise or Hybrid. Please contact us directly to explore these options and provide applicable solution well suited for your needs.
